World War 1

By kwe

  • Hollywood becoming the center of movie production

    1. Started a series of Jack London movies
    2. Paramount was the first successful nationwide distributor
    3. Films were sold on a statewide or regional basis which had proved costly to film producers

  • Assassination of Archduke Franz

    1. June the 28th was the wedding anniversary of Archduke and his wife's Sophia.
    2. Nedjelko Cabrinovic threw a bomb at their car
    3. The assassination of Franz and Sophia set off a rapid chain of events

  • Germany declares war on Russia and France. Great Britain declares war on Germany and Austria-Hungary

    1. Hours later, France makes it's own declaration of war against Germany
    2. Hours before Germany's declaration of war on France on August 3rd the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, went before Parlament and convinced a divided British government
    3. The first wave of German troops assembled on the frontier of neutral Belgium

  • Alexander Graham Bell makes first transcontinental telephone call

    1. At the Cenntennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, in 1876, Bell demonstrated the telephone to the Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro
    2. Alexander moved to Boston and began work on a device that would allow for the telegraph transmission of several messages set to different frequencies
    3. Over the next 18 years, the Bell company faced over 550 court challenges, including several that went to the Supreme Court

  • Albert Einstein purposes general theory of relativity

    1. Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on theoretical physics.
    2. Special relativity being introduced in his 1905 paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies".
    3. He worked on many other influential theories and projects.

  • German U-boats sink the Lusitania

    1. Occured off the Southern coast of Ireland
    2. The Germans defended their action on the grounds that the liner carried ammunition
    3. Americans became outraged with Germany because of the loss of the life. American public opinion turned against Germany and the Central Powers

  • Woodrow Wilson is reelected president

    1. In 1916 he defeated Republican opponent Charles Evan Hughes by one of the narrowest victories in history.
    2. The election came down to California, which Wilson won by 1500 votes, and thus gathered enough electoral votes to win.
    3. He ran on the slogan "He kept us out of war".

  • The battles of Verdun and the Somme claim millions of lives

    1. The first day of the Somme offensive July 1, 1916, resulted in 57,470 British casualities, greater than the total combined British casualities in the Crimean, Boer, and Korean war.
    2. By the time the offensive ended in November, the British had suffered around 420,000 casualities, and the French about 200,000.
    3. German casualty numbers are controversial, but may be about 465,000

  • The United States declares war on Germany

    1. President Wilson appeared before a joint session of Congress and asked for a declaration of of war against Germany in order to make the world safe for democracy.
    2. In January 1917, Germany renewed it's policy of unrestricted submarine warfare that it had abandoned in 1915 after the sinking of the Lusitania.
    3. America thus joined the carnage that had been ravaging Europe since 1914.

  • The Selective Service Act sets up the draft

    1. The Act was passed authorizing the President to increase temporarily the military establishment of the United States.
    2. It was responsible for the process of selecting men for induction into the military service.
    3. The Selective Service System was one of "supervised decentralization

  • Russia withdrawls from the war

    1. In 1914 the Russian government considered Germany to be the main threat to it's territory, this was reinforced by Germany's decision to form the Triple Alliance.
    2. In 1914 the Russian Army was the largest army in the world. However, Russia's poor roads and railways made the effective deployment of these soldiers difficult.
    3. On September 9, 1914 General General Paul Ron Rennenkampf ordered his remaining troops to withdraw. The German Army had regained all the territory lost.

  • President Wilson proposes the League of Nations

    1. International organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, created after the first World War to provide a forum for resolving international disputes.
    2. Speaking before the U.S. Congress on January, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson enumerated the last of his Fourteen Points, which called for a "general association of nations".
    3. The United States never joined the League.

  • Bolshevik Revolution

    1. It was initiated by millions of people who would change the history of the world as we know it.
    2. When Czar Nicholas II dragged 11 million peasants into World War I, the Russian people became discouraged with their injures and the loss of life they sustained.
    3. The country of Russia was in ruins, ripe for revolution.

  • Congress passes the Sedition Act

    1. A piece of legislation designed to protect America's participation in World War I.
    2. The Sedition Act imposed harsh penalities on anyone found guilty of making false statements that interfered with the prosecution of the war.
    3. Those who were found guilty of such actions, the act stated, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both.

  • The First World War ends

    1. At 5 a.m. that morning, Germany, bereft of manpower and supplies and faced with imminent invasion, signed an armistice agreement with the Allies.
    2. The First World War left nine million soldiers dead and 21 million wounded, with Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France, and Great-Britain each losing nearly a million or more lives.
    3. In addition, at least five million civilians died from disease, starvation, or exposure.

  • A worldwide influenza epidemic kills over 30 million

    1. It infected 500 million people across the world, including remote Pacific Islands and the Arctic.
    2. Most influenza outbreaks disproportionately kill juvenile, elderly, or already weakened patients.
    3. The strong immune reactions of young adults ravaged the body, whereas the weaker immune sytems of children and middle-aged adults resulted in fewer deaths among those groups.

  • Congress approves the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the vote

    1. A vote known as women suffrage.
    2. It was not unitl 1848that the movement for women's rights lauched on a national level with a convention in Seneca Falls, New York.
    3. After a 70-year battle, these groups finally emerged victorious with the passage of the 19th Amendment.